PeteJun 25, 2024

New blog post

Pushing Off of Aristotle
by Mona Mona

Given that #Aristotle made a decision to begin with objects, #Heidegger wants to go back behind Aristotle and place “humans” at the center and origin of his account.

When Heidegger’s Being and Time was brought into France, a French interpretation of the work by #Sartre, #Beauvoir, #Levinas, #MerleauPonty and others came to be known by the shorter name, #Existentialism. And now you know, the start of the story.

https://philosophypublics.substack.com/p/heidegger-in-a-tiny-nutshell

Heidegger In A Tiny Nutshell

Pushing Off of Aristotle Heidegger criticizes Aristotle’s study of beings in the Physics and Metaphysics because it assumes things/objects as the primary focus. Humans (subjects, more precisely) don’t fit well into a study of beings that assumes objects are where it’s at. Plus, anything that we know, we know as subjects - in and through our subjectivity, though our perceptive abilities, our embodiment, and our cognitive abilities to think. Given this, Heidegger makes the now obvious point that should start by seeking to understand “the being for whom it’s own being is an issue “— that is us, the being that can reflect on it’s own existence and ask questions about it. We should study subjectivity and what we can come to know as subjects in the world.

Philosophy Publics
Show threadClaudia HauptAug 1, 2024

@beyng

#Lévinas' reception of #Heidegger had little influence on the existentialists, although he was well acquainted with both Gabriel Marcel and Jean Paul Sarte. Lévinas stood apart from the existentialist discourse. Only the post-structuralists such as #Derrida began to take note of his reception of Heidegger. And his relationship to Heidegger and his "fundamental" #ontology remained ambivalent, probably also because of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and #Nazi past

Show threadPete
@queerwiki Not to disagree with you, but to expand, I read a #Sartre and #Beauvoir bio a couple decades ago that claimed that #Levinas explained #Heidegger to Simone, who then explained him to Jean Paul. Also, there's a Jean Wahl interview with Levinas from the 30s/40s where Levinas shows that he understood Heidegger better than his French contemporaries.
Aug 1, 2024 at 4:06pmWeb
Show threadClaudia HauptAug 1, 2024

@beyng

Yes, that's right, Salomon Malka confirmed that. I'll add something else: Lévinas was an excellent connoisseur of Heidegger. But his enthusiasm centred on "Sein und Zeit" (he could do nothing with Heidegger's "Kehre") Levinas began to turn away from Heidegger in the 1930s. After 1945 Levinas publicly began to take the position that ontologies such as Heidegger's had ultimately prepared the Holocaust. The existentialists of the post-war period did not adopt this.